Separating the rams

I love keeping native breed sheep. They are so much more suitable to my style of smallholding than any of the larger breeds. My chosen variety are Shetland sheep.
For a start, they don't demand acres of lush green grass. In fact they seem to prefer my rougher pasture. Most of all they would like to get in amongst my young woodland where they would for certain make short work of the trees and saplings.

My Shetland sheep demolishing some sow thistle plants I've thrown in for them.

Rambo is the gorgeous boy in the foreground.

Come lambing time, they are not trying to give birth to ridiculously large little monsters which are basically too big to come out, so there are few problems and very few occasions to call the vet (an arm and a leg would seem cheap). This makes lambing time slightly less stressful, for I do not come from a farming background and do not have the experience for this not to be a tremendously worrying time.

The downside is that they do not produce a massive carcass and, despite leaving the young rams entire this year, they would still provide relatively slim pickings if I sent them on their way now. Instead we keep them through to a second year and look forward to what is known as hogget meat.

This brings its own complications too. Firstly they need enough pasture to support the adults and this year's young through the winter. But as mentioned before, they get by on very little so this is not too much of a problem. The bigger problem is that of separating related males and females.
Native breeds have a shorter breeding season than other sheep, but by mid-August the males start getting ideas!

So a few weeks back I erected a short stretch of stock fence to divide my paddocks into two. We already have electric fence, but for the sake of getting to the girls the rams would probably be prepared to take the hit.
Luckily we got enough rain just in time for me to knock in the posts. Prior to that the ground had been like concrete.

My ewes stripping some willow for me.

All the rams have settled in well and Rambo is tolerating the presence of his five sons. The ewes are enjoying the lack of male attention too. They do in fact have one male lurking amongst them but he is not interested as he got the chop last year. He is known as a wether. It is useful to keep one such boy to keep the ram company if he ever needs to be away from all the others.

We will wait till early November before letting Rambo in with the girls. That way we reduce the risk of poor weather at lambing time and if we are lucky lambing will coincide with our Easter holidays. There is no hurry to get the lambs out early in the year as we are not aiming to fatten them up before the grass dies down in late autumn.
When this happens any of last year's ewe lambs (Rambo's daughters) will need to go into a third separate paddock away from their dad and brothers.

Luckily the grass has grown back strong after the early summer drought so there are no problems going into the autumn. I have stocked up on hay for it will be in short supply this year and the price will rise steeply if availability becomes a problem. I hardly need to use any in normal circumstances, but you need to have it in just in case.